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Topic: Malnati Deep Dish with Semolina (Read 244971 times)

I tried a BTB Chicago deep dish style pizza this past weekend using 70% all purpose flour, 20% semolina, and 10% rice flour. I have to say in this particular experiment, I was not happy with the results. The taste of the rice flour came through too much in the crust and I didn't care for it. I still like the semolina, but I will probably not use the rice flour in my deep-dish pies in the future. I have tried (at BTB's suggestion) rice flour in other dough recipes, such as a thin American-style dough recipe and found it to work just fine. I usually use between 10-20% rice flour if I use it.

I made two 9" deep dish pizzas recently -- the first with 80% white flour and 20% semolina flour, and the second with 80% white flour, 12% semolina flour and 8% rice flour. The result was that both pizzas were terrific and absolutely delicious.

Similar to a number of pizzamaking tests that I did with this in the recent past, among my taste testers there was a slight preference for the version with a little rice flour. I, too, thought both were great, but thought the little extra crunch that the rice flour gave to the crust was a feature that I and others have found a desirable characteristic to the pie. To both pizzas I added 1 tsp. of baker's NFDM, which I find myself doing almost regularly to all styles of thin and thick pizzas these days. And since I ran out of my King Arthur AP flour, I had to use GM's Better for Bread flour with these pizzas. While it turned out with a slightly greater "puff" to the crust, the pizzas turned out seemingly just as great anyway.

And to the 6 in 1 sauce that I drained for about 20 minutes, I added some white and black pepper, salt, minced garlic, Penzey pizza spices, some great diced tomatoes from Muir Glen, a dash of light brown sugar as well as honey, and sprinkled some Penzey basil and oregano and some grated parmesan cheese on top. I find myself more and more just putting on "pinches" of the spices as they can be overpowering if put on too heavily. The picture of the underneath portion of the crust shows the "perfect" degree of browness in my estimation. And the last piece shown below was quickly gobbled up after the picture was taken. All in all, some great pizza eating opportunities. --BTB

Delicious looking BTB!!!Winter arounfd the corner so I will ba back at the deep dish I will add that rice flour and post resultsKepp em coming PLEASE!!!JOhn

I'm right behind you. I hate the winter! I'm going to venture into the world of deep dish this winter which up until now has been unchartered waters for me. I'm going to give it a shot using my starter which I don't believe anyone has tried yet.

I'm going to venture into the world of deep dish this winter which up until now has been unchartered waters for me. I'm going to give it a shot using my starter which I don't believe anyone has tried yet.

Your seemingly simple question is not so simple to quickly answer. What size are you talking about (6", 9", 12", 14" etc, etc)? What kind or which recipe? Suggest you spend a little time studying the weight tools and you'll find it real simple and easy to use. Otherwise we have to guess about a dozen or more different variables as to what you may mean or be talking about. Please check out Peter's response above at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,6480.msg73191.html#msg73191. With using weight measures and the tools provided in this site, you can convert a recipe for a 9" pie to a 14" pie or any other size in seconds. It is very easy.

At the same time I made a 9" pie using a little more semolina flour (25%) to see what affect that would have. Similar to the above, I used King Arthur AP and Bob's Red Mill semolina with a 1.5% bowl residue, and the formulation was as follows:

***Again factoring out the amount of semolina flour from the AP flour.

The process was similar to that indicated above, except I withheld any salt and put in a smidgeon of sugar and cream of tartar to see what affect that might have. The ingredients were the same as indicated for the 12" pie mentioned above.

I followed this recipe using the gram weights provided for a 9" pan. I weighed my dough ball after completion and it weighed 305 grams. The crust with my short weight ball however was absolutely perfect after baking...

Dumb question: If you total the above recipe, the gram weight comes out to 311.55... did I miss something?

It looks like you are correct, flavorguy, the total does add up to over 311g. Look at the semolina, I think it's calculated twice but BTB notes that. The six gram difference (less than 2%) you came up short can be attributed most likely to bowl residue but possibly a combination of bowl residue and slightly off weights (rounded down, etc.).

I had a hard time at first recalling the methodology used in calculating the formulations in the early days of this thread. I was initially blaming the incorrect total ingredient weight on a bad bottle of scotch that I had back then, but then I figured out how it got to be that way.

When first exploring the use of semolina in the recipe, since the deep-dish dough calculation tool had a specific box in it in which to put a figure in for the proportion of Semolina, I added the proportion directly into the tool. In several correspondences with Peter, he rightfully pointed out to me that by adding a figure for semolina into the tool itself, it will not really be accurate or reflective of the "proportion" that one may want (i.e. a proportion of the flour . . . which all non-flour ingredients are).

For instance, and as was done in Reply #19, I wanted a recipe with 25% semolina and I put that figure into the tool and it gave me approx. 44.4 grams of semolina. Instead of subtracting it from the flour apart from the tool, it mistakenly got added. Instead of 355.95 grams of ingredients in total, it should have been 311.55 grams or a difference of 44.4 grams.

The earlier recipes are still fine and give great results, but the total ingredient weight should be ignored in a few of the earlier ones in the thread. BUT in using the tool as I did, the 44.4 grams of semolina does not really amount to 25% of the weight of the flour. The amount of flour in this recipe was 133.19 grams and 25% of that would be approx. 33.3 grams, not 44.4 grams. (And the amount of all-purpose flour would then be 109.89 grams) In other words, one needs to modify somewhat that part of the all-purpose flour that will be replaced by semolina flour. See Reply #34 below. You'll note that I modified the methodology in subsequent recipes, altho the older ones would give great results, too.

I'm not sure if this clarifies or confuses things more. In any event, I'm glad to hear of your positive experience with using semolina in deep dish pizza. Sorry about the Eagles, tho. --BTB Afterthought: Some of the figures in the 3rd and 4th paragraph above are not accurate. I explain further in another response below.

As a point of clarification, how far up the sides of your pans (2" deep) do you normally push the dough? In an earlier post in this thread I assumed that it was 1.5". This is only an issue when one uses the thickness factor option in the deep-dish dough calculating tool. I believe you have been using a nominal thickness factor of 0.125 and a bowl residue compensation of 1.5%.

Peter, yes to all. I generally always go up 1.5" up the side of the pan, use a 0.125 thickness factor, and 1.5% bowl residue. I'm uncertain what you mean by "this is only an issue when one uses the thickness factor option in the deep-dish dough calculating tool." --BTB

I'm uncertain what you mean by "this is only an issue when one uses the thickness factor option in the deep-dish dough calculating tool."

BTB,

Maybe a simple example will clarify my statement. Let us assume that you want to make a deep-dish pizza dough using a straight-sided 9" x 2" deep pan, with the dough pushed up the sides by 1 1/2", and using the baker's percents recited in Reply 19 at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,6480.msg62317.html#msg62317 and a bowl residue compensation of 1.5%. Let's further assume that the flour and semolina are treated as a blend, with 25% of the blend being semolina, so that the baker's percents are correct (which they are in Reply 19 if we treat the King Arthur all-purpose flour and the Bob's Red Mill semolina as a blend). Entering all of the above values into the the deep-dish dough calculating tool using the thickness factor option, we get the following:

As you can see, the total dough weight is 355.95 grams (12.56 ounces), not 311.55 grams (10.99 ounces). However, for the sake of our analysis, let us assume that you meant the total dough weight to be 311.55 grams after all. Using the dough weight option of the deep-dish dough calculating tool, and again treating the KAAP and semolina as a blend, we get the following:

As you can see, the second dough formulation calls for less dough than the first dough formulation posted above. If I decided to use the second example to calculate the corresponding thickness factor, it would be 0.111045 (I did this by plugging in different values in the thickness factor box until the dough formulations were as close to each other as possible), and the dough formulation produced by the deep-dish dough calculating tool would look like this:

Note: Pan is straight-sided and 9" in diameter; the dough is pushed up the sides of the pan by 1 1/2"

As the last dough formulation demonstrates, the crust would be somewhat thinner than the first example. In fact, the dough weight difference is a bit over 1.5 ounces. However, since there is always some variations in the way that people make their doughs and fit them to their pans, the results aren't likely to vary in a dramatic way. For example, people rarely push the dough up the sides of the pan by exactly 1 1/2". Also, some people press the dough into the pan by hand and others use a rolling pin to roll out the dough before fitting into the pan. Actual final dough weights can also vary because of normal variations among the different ingredients and different brands of the ingredients. flavorguy demonstrated that a version of your recipe using a lower thickness factor produces a very acceptable end result. Maybe next time he can try the first dough formulation posted above in this post and compare the results with the results he reported on earlier.

I further studied what I did in connection with the crust formulation in Reply #19 above. Today -- after learning much here on this site -- I would figure out the recipe differently and would not enter a semolina figure in the deep dish calculation tool anymore as I did back then. However, that earlier formulation still works fine and gives great results as the pictures show. Peter, you are right on your calculations. My figures just yesterday in Reply #130 above were a little mixed up (bad memory or damn scotch) and I'll further revise them herein.

What I did back 18 to 24 months ago was enter 25% semolina in the deep dish calculation tool itself, which in that formulation resulted in the all-purpose flour weight of 177.58 grams and semolina flour weight of 44.39 grams. I misinterpreted Peter's comments back then and subtracted the 44.39 grams from the 177.58 grams resulting in the reported 133.19 grams, which provided for a fine pizza but resulted in the proportions being way out of wack. Further, by entering 25% (or any other figure) in the deep dish calculation tool itself, Peter you indicated that that results in changing the weights and throwing the other ingredients out of wack, too. Blending of the flour "outside" the tool (meaning calculating outside the tool) seemed to show a more preferable way to go and does not result in changing the weights of all the other ingredients. At least that's one point of view.

So, the way I do this exact formulation today -- and I think in all subsequent formulations in the thread -- is as Peter indicated in his first example. For a 9" diameter deep dish pizza, with the dough pushed up approx. 1.5" up side of pan, a TF of 0.125, and bowl residue of 1.5%, the tool results would show:

After getting this result with the deep dish calculation tool, if one wanted a proportion of the flour to be 25% semolina flour, you would do the calculation thusly: 202.88 grams of flour, 25% = 50.72 grams (1.79 ounces) and the 75% remainder would be 152.16 grams (5.37 ounces) of AP flour. And by doing it this way, none of the weights of the other ingredients changes, making it -- believe it or not -- less complicated if you wanted to change the proportion of semolina or other flours in subsequent recipes.

Parenthetically, I no longer use cream of tartar as an ingredient as in this formulation. Such was noted elsewhere as a dough conditioner and reportedly used in some of the Chicago pizzerias (like Gino's East). After some experience with it, I couldn't see the value of its addition. I occasionally add a half tsp of Baker's NFDM instead, but that is also not essential.

All this is making me hungry. I think I'll head for the kitchen . . . . --BTB

The approach you discussed makes sense most when you are using a blend of flours, like all-purpose flour and semolina, that are all subject to the hydration process. To show you (and other members) how a dough formulation can paint a distorted picture if an ingredient like the semolina is treated separately in the dough formulation, that is, not treated together with the all-purpose flour, note the baker's percents in this example, using the ingredients and quantities we have been discussing:

As you can see, the individual ingredient weights and the final dough weight are all correct but the baker's percents, especially for the hydration and for the two oils, and even for the semolina, do not paint an accurate picture of what is really happening.

I tried this recipe yesterday after an attempt a week ago w/o semolina.

A few issues:

1. I made the crust & refrigerated in a bag for 4 days. i was planning on 1 day, but something came up. Is that too long? Would that kill my yeast?

2. Did not withold 1/4 cup of AP & just mixed all the flour & oils at the same time....is that a big deal?

3. Used a spring form 11" dark no stick for pan. Is that OK?

4. I was very worried about my sausage being fully cooked. I cooked on a Big Green Egg on a pizza stone for about 35 min @ 450-500F. At that point a dig thermometer read about 150F in center. I put in 350F oven for about another 10 min. I was afraid to burn the crust in an effort to cook the sausage. should this be a concern? should i cook on a rack instead of a stone?

5. On a side note. What's the differance between "active dry yeast" & "rapid rise highly active yeast"? (Fleischmann's) can i interchange?

Attached is a pic (hopefully if attaches) of previous pie w/o semolina. last nights was much better tasting...but the crust looked very similiar. That one i pre cooked the sausage though.

Welcome firefly to the website. Just some quick thoughts. I would never use dough refrigerated for 4 days. It doesn't seem to work right, at least for me. But others may have some different thoughts. Not withholding the quarter cup of AP is no big deal. I often forget and don't think the difference is worth worrying about. I don't favor springform pans, but some do. But see tikidoc's story at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,9767.msg85101.html#msg85101(" . . . the two piece pan leaked out some of the oil in the bottom of the pan, creating a lot of smoke. My range hood is pretty good so it was not a terribly big deal, but I need to get some real deep dish pans." )

I have no idea what you mean by saying that you cooked "on a Big Green Egg." I always -- like all the major deep dish pizzerias in Chicago -- bake the pizza with uncooked sausage and never had a problem. And those pizzerias usually cook from 425 to 475 degrees F. Pre-cooked sausage doesn't taste very good to me and others when it gets extremely overcooked. But some still have a preference to cook the sausage first. That's a personal preference, I guess. I'll let someone else explain the difference between ADY and IDY. You can interchange but at a little different amounts. I have a big preference for, and only use, ADY.

The pictures still looked pretty good. You'll get it down pat in no time. --BTB

Thanks, a Big Green Egg" is a komodo style smoker/grill capable of 1000Ftemps. Works a lot like a coal fired pizza oven, I'm told. The 4 days didn't seem to mess with my dough too much....good with room for improvement.

I have no idea what you mean by saying that you cooked "on a Big Green Egg." I always -- like all the major deep dish pizzerias in Chicago -- bake the pizza with uncooked sausage and never had a problem. And those pizzerias usually cook from 425 to 475 degrees F. Pre-cooked sausage doesn't taste very good to me and others when it get extremely overcooked. But some still have a preference to cook the sausage first. That's a personal preference, I guess. I'll let someone else explain the difference between ADY and IDY. You can interchange but at a little different amounts. I have a big preference for, and only use, ADY.

The pictures still looked pretty good. You'll get it down pat in no time. --BTB